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Thursday, September 12, 2013

We Are Building The Second Layer Of "Environmental" Parasitism (or worse)

The estimable Professor John Brignall from Numberwatch on fracking:
"Fracking is an awkward and inconvenient business, ironically only made viable by the success of the watermelons in cutting off other supplies of reliable energy. If you make such energy (the greatest essential for modern civilisation) scarce then its price rises until other sources become competitive."
So what we are seeing is second generation ecofascist parasitism. We have already been deprived for 40 years of the easiest and most affordable new power generation; we are now being deprived of the next new one, less easy and affordable than nuclear but still cheaper than coal and traditional gas and far cheaper than windmills.
Clearly the restraining effect on human progress is mounting but equally clearly this is an increasingly unstable situation in that any country promoting progress is inevitably going to find it ever easier to embrace progress and will get ever greater benefits from doing so. Thus providing an example to the rest of the world.
The only counterforce to this instability is increasing elements of world government. Only a totalitarian government of the world (and inhabited space) could keep prevent any nation choosing progress and providing the example. Once space is significantly inhabited I cannot see a world government being technologically capable of enforcing totalitarianism there - indeed a space habitat almost automatically couldn't be run by Luddites.

    "Civilization might recover from the damage of a nuclear war, but judging by past static empires in Egypt and China, it might never recover from world government, there being no chance of external intervention. As it is, present governments are only prevented from becoming dominated by crazy ideas that will suppress all opposition by the existence of other governments. The only way a people can be sure that their government is substandard is that it does worse than those of other countries."   late Professor John McCarthy

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